{"id":4032,"date":"2012-02-04T18:45:45","date_gmt":"2012-02-04T17:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4032"},"modified":"2012-02-05T10:13:55","modified_gmt":"2012-02-05T09:13:55","slug":"a-month-of-math-software-%e2%80%93-january-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4032","title":{"rendered":"A month of math software \u2013 January 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the first MMS of 2012.\u00a0 This series has been going for a year now and I&#8217;m very pleased to say that it&#8217;s become quite popular.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3173\"> In the beginning<\/a> I had to trawl the web for all of the news I featured here but a sizeable percentage of it gets sent to me these days.\u00a0 If you&#8217;ve got some news about mathematical sofware then <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?page_id=2055\">contact me<\/a> and tell me all about it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>General purpose mathematics<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sagemath.org\/\">Sage<\/a>, the python based open source computational algebra system, has been updated to version 4.8.\u00a0 View <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sagemath.org\/mirror\/src\/changelogs\/sage-4.8.txt\">the changelog<\/a> to see what&#8217;s new.\u00a0 94 people contributed to this release according to the changelog which is very impressive!\u00a0 I wonder how that compares to the number of developers on commercial systems such as Maple, Mathematica and MATLAB?<\/li>\n<li>After a long wait, we get not one but two new versions of the free Mathcad clone, Smath Studio in one month.\u00a0 Lots of great new features in versions <a href=\"http:\/\/en.smath.info\/forum\/default.aspx?g=posts&amp;t=1120\">0.90<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.smath.info\/forum\/default.aspx?g=posts&amp;t=1158\">0.91<\/a> of this very nice multiplatform application.<\/li>\n<li> <a href=\"http:\/\/magma.maths.usyd.edu.au\/magma\/releasenotes\/2\/18\/3\/\">Verision 2.18-3 of Magma<\/a>, the commercial computational algebra system, has been released.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Community<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The new <a href=\"http:\/\/mathematica.stackexchange.com\/\">Mathematica StackExchange<\/a> site has been launched so head over there for all of your Mathematica question and answer needs.<\/li>\n<li>The Mathworks have released an online community programing game for MATLABers called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/cody\">Cody<\/a>.\u00a0 Problems start off incredibily easy and as you solve them, more difficult ones get unlocked.\u00a0 Your attempts are automatically scored by The Mathwork&#8217;s servers so feeback is instant and you can view other people&#8217;s solutions once you&#8217;ve solved a problem yourself.\u00a0 All in all, a great new way to sharpen your MATLAB programming skills.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Partial Differential Equations<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A new set of open-source software tools written in C++ for performing Partial         Differential Equation (PDE) analysis and solving PDE         constrained optimization problems has been released &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/su2.stanford.edu\/\">Stanford University Unstructured (SU2)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Mobile<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An article on smartphone apps for mathematics, written by Peter Rowlett, Hazel Lewis and I, has been published in the January 2012 edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atm.org.uk\/journal\/\">Mathematics Teaching<\/a>.\u00a0 Ironically, none of the authors of the article have seen the finished product yet since we are not subscribers!<\/li>\n<li>Michael Carreno sent me news of the release of his graphical calculator app for iPhone, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ablemath.com\/\">AbleMath<\/a>.\u00a0 I haven&#8217;t had chance to try it yet since Mrs WalkingRandomly refuses anything mathematical on her iPhone and I am an Android man myself.\u00a0 However, the screenshots look very nice and, since it&#8217;s free, it&#8217;s a lot cheaper than those <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3418\">expensive, underpowered junkers<\/a> that American schools seem to insist on teaching with.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ablemath.com\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/images\/random\/ablemath.jpg\" alt=\"AbleMath\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>Linear Algebra<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Linear Algebra<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Version 3.0 of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mims.manchester.ac.uk\/research\/numerical-analysis\/nlevp.html\">NLEVP (Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problems) Toolbox for MATLAB<\/a> was released in December 2011 but I found out about it too late for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4014\">December&#8217;s edition of MMS<\/a>.\u00a0 It contains problems from models of real-life applications as well as problems constructed specifically to have particular properties. The collection is fully documented in the <a href=\"http:\/\/eprints.ma.man.ac.uk\/1738\">Technical Report<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/eprints.ma.man.ac.uk\/1739\">user&#8217;s guide<\/a>.\u00a0 This release contains 52 problems (up from 46 in version 2.0) and new functionality; <strong>it is also now compatible with GNU Octave.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/viennacl.sourceforge.net\/\">ViennaCL<\/a>, a  GPU-accelerated C++ open-source\u00a0linear algebra library, was updated to  version 1.2.0 on December 31st (just missing the deadline for <a href=\"..\/?p=4014\">December\u2019s Month of Math Software<\/a>).  \u00a0Roughly speaking, ViennaCL is a mixture of Boost.ublas  (high-level\u00a0interface) and MAGMA (GPU-support), yet based on OpenCL  rather than\u00a0CUDA.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Statistics<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Version 0.95 of <a href=\"http:\/\/rstudio.org\/\">RStudio<\/a> has been released.\u00a0 RStudio is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for the free statistical programming language, R.\u00a0 Check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rstudio.org\/#screencast\">the screencast detailing the new features<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/images\/random\/rstudio-windows.png\" alt=\"RStudio on Windows\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>From the blogs<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2012\/02\/02\/happy-109876-54321\/\">Happy 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/loren\/2012\/01\/13\/best-practices-for-programming-matlab\/\">Best Practices for Programming MATLAB<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolframalpha.com\/2012\/01\/30\/step-by-step-differential-equation-solutions-in-wolframalpha\/\">Step-by-Step Differential Equation Solutions in Wolfram|Alpha<\/a><\/li>\n<li>PTC are preparing us for a new release of Mathcad Prime with several blog posts.\u00a0 Topics include <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ptc.com\/2012\/01\/06\/now-thats-what-i-call-performance-a-sneak-peek-at-mathcad-prime-2-0\/\">performance enhancements<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ptc.com\/2012\/01\/13\/collapsible-areas-a-mathcad-prime-2-0-feature-we-dont-want-to-conceal\/\">collapsible areas<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ptc.com\/2012\/01\/03\/symbolic-calculation-receives-very-high-marks\/\">symbolic calculation<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I should really be including this next one in February&#8217;s edition but it&#8217;s so interesting that I think I&#8217;ll share it now.\u00a0 Aur\u00e9lien Garivier has written <a href=\"http:\/\/perso.telecom-paristech.fr\/~garivier\/code\/index.php\">The Baum-Welch algorithm for hidden Markov Models: speed comparison between octave \/ python \/ R \/ scilab \/ matlab \/ C<\/a> which gives you exactly what it says on the tin.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the first MMS of 2012.\u00a0 This series has been going for a year now and I&#8217;m very pleased to say that it&#8217;s become quite popular.\u00a0 In the beginning I had to trawl the web for all of the news I featured here but a sizeable percentage of it gets sent to me these [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-month-of-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-132","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4032"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4125,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4032\/revisions\/4125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}